This Crooked Way (25 page)

There was nothing they could do except try to get away, and that was what they did, creeping along the dark side of every rock they could find to cover them.

But it was all for nothing. The dragon cavalry flew over them and dropped nets and, when they were trapped, the Khroic soldiers came and knocked them out one by one.

Thend struggled as best he could, but it was no use. He noticed, too, that the Khroi who clubbed him into unconsciousness had a purplish carapace marked by savage scraping near the neck. The point of a rock was stuck there in the Khroi's shell like a tooth.

“I should have left you for the spiders!” Thend shouted; then the Khroi's club descended and darkness with it.

Thend dreamed he was flying, and then when he woke up he found it wasn't a dream. He was hanging facedown in a wire net, hundreds or thousands of feet over the moonslit broken ground of the Kirach Kund. Twisting around, he saw the net was gripped in the claws of a dragon. He wanted to shout something defiant and insulting, but fear kept a grip on his throat: he had never been so high in his life and he didn't like it. He closed his eyes and pretended he was somewhere else, anywhere else.

He must have slept or passed out. When he awoke he could hear the adults talking to each other in low voices. But he could hear other, inhuman voices, too, so he was spared the terrible, tempting illusion that their captivity was only a dream.

Thend opened his eyes to see Fasra's frightened face in profile. If she was scared, then things were pretty bad. Beyond her Thend saw his brothers. On the other side he saw his mother and her brother, and beyond them Morlock looking rather beat up.

Roble and Naeli avoided meeting Thend's eye, but Morlock looked him straight in the face, smiling sadly. “We meet again!” said the crooked man.

“Unfortunately,” Thend said rudely, because he didn't know what else to say, and Morlock nodded in agreement.

Things were unfortunate indeed. They were all sitting there in a valley, bound hand and foot with leathery rope. Even the werewolf was there, hogtied and snarling. Standing over them were huge Khroi warriors, of a type Thend had never seen. On one slope of the valley, rank on rank, sat a whole horde or tribe of Khroi. Facing them, on the other side of the valley, were dozens of fiery, bat-winged, serpentine forms in various dark colors: an irregular burning rainbow of dragons.

Thend looked up to the sky. Chariot, the major moon, was eastering; and Horseman, the second moon, was high in the sky. Thend looked up at it, thinking that this was the last sky he would ever see. The thought was convincing but cold; he felt nothing about it. He wondered if this were part of dying: giving up interest in anything as the jaws of death clamped down.

He looked at the valley. He saw the Khroi were of many different types. There were the strange gigantic warriors who stood over them, guarding them with spears. Nearby were the warriors, wearing spiked blades on their palp-clusters; they wore white ceremonial tabards with some kind of writing on them. Above them were ranks of Khroi wearing black surcoats. It struck Thend that they might be elders, Khroi who had aged out of the warrior class. Above them on the slope was a milling crowd of Khroi dressed in black and white rags. Some were dancing, others were lying on the ground, waving their palp-clusters and ped-clusters in the air. Highest of all was a lone figure who sat on the steps of an empty gigantic throne. He wore a tabard of white embroidered with red and black in a chaotic pattern.

The dragons all spoke only to this Khroi who sat before the empty throne, never to the others, and all the other Khroi also spoke to him; he alone spoke to the dragons.

There was some sort of discussion or negotiation going on; Thend didn't know if it was all about them, although some of it clearly was. He had thought that the dragons were merely animals that the Khroi rode, like a man riding a horse, but he saw now that he was wrong. There was some sort of alliance between the two races.

The discussion appeared to be coming to some kind of conclusion when it was interrupted. Morlock interrupted it, rising to his feet (he must have untied the rope around his ankles), and, turning away from the Khroi, he spoke directly to the dragons in something that sounded a great deal like the language they had been using.

The dragons responded heatedly, and a few edged closer to Morlock when the Khroi leader interrupted them with a harsh word.

“If you have anything to say,” the Khroi leader called down the slope in Coranian, “you will speak to me, Morlock Ambrosius. I am both
kharum
to this guile of dragons and
marh
to this horde of Khroi. They speak to me, and I speak for them. But I tell you now, Destroyer: there is nothing you might say that I would wish to hear.”

Morlock looked once down the line of dragons, left to right. Thend thought there was a smile on his face as he met the dragons' burning eyes. Then he slowly turned his back on them and many snarled in anger as he did so.

Morlock called up the slope to the Marh, saying, “Your name? It seems you know mine.”

“I have many names,” the Khroi leader said. “I was called one thing by the gods-who-hate-me in their thoughts before my first birth. That is ever my true name and I will learn it only in death at my final damnation. The Virgin Sisters called me another name after my second birth, when I ate my way clear from my dying host. As warrior-in-training I had a third name; as warrior-in-deed I won a fourth. In my time I became an elder and a seer, and I had names in both those avatars. Now I am Marh Valone, marh of deathless Valona's horde. Work your magic on my name at your peril, Destroyer: it has Valona's strength in it.”

“I don't use binding magic,” Morlock observed, “or fear it. I greet you, Marh Valone. You call me Destroyer, but if you spare our lives we will spare yours.”

Marh Valone fixed one of his three eyes on Morlock. He left his seat before the vacant throne and walked down the slope, never looking away. The dancing figures in black and white tried to restrain him, but he kicked them out of his way and continued down the slope, where the elders and warriors made a lane for him. He stood at last before Morlock, just beyond the hulking spear-carrying guards, and said, “What did you say?”

“Perhaps I wasn't clear. I—”

“I speak and understand this language better than you,” Marh Valone interrupted him. “I use it because most of you understand it. That's Dwarvish law, as you learned from your foster kin under Thrymhaiam. If I had chosen I could have addressed you in Dwarvish, in Brythonic or Latin: in any language you know. No one-face language is difficult for us; our young invent more complicated ones before they lose their quadrilimbs. You can have no vowels-in-harmony, no consonant-rhythms. Each of you has but one mouth, only one! And you are barely able to use that, in song or speech. No,
Destroyer
, I ask you to repeat what you said simply because I desire to hear you say it again.”

Morlock calmly repeated, “If you spare our lives, we will spare yours. Blood for blood: that is Dwarvish law as I learned it under Thrymhaiam.”

Marh Valone lifted all three of his boneless arms, and each of his three mouths emitted a different musical sound. Behind him on the slope many of the warriors and elders mimicked him. The dancing figures in black and white covered their eyes with their palp-clusters and moaned.

Marh Valone crooked each of his arms at an alarmingly sharp angle and silence fell. “Oh gods-who-hate-us,” he said at last, “I thank you. Oh Ancestors who cast us out and revile us, I thank you. Though we have earned your loathing, though we are sunk and stained with the evil of wandering through these evil lands, you have sent us this gift. We have heard the Destroyer beg for his life,
and be refused.”

“I am a maker,” Morlock said, “not a destroyer, except to defend myself or those of my blood. If you do not choose to harm us, you need fear nothing from me. Your seers will have ways to test these words, as sure as any oath.”

“No oath sworn to us can ever be binding, Destroyer, as well you know,” Marh Valone said. “We are the accursed. Your lies will not deceive us, either: we are the servants of the Great Lie. It is the Great Lie who tells us all these truths, who guides our visions of the future, who makes us unclean. We know who you are, even if you don't. You are the Destroyer.”

“Your seers have had some vision?” Morlock guessed. “But the future is not fixed, like the past. The future is the sum of our decisions; we can change our minds in the present and save ourselves in the future.”

“I tell you again,
do not lie.
Some parts of the future can be chosen; some come at us like an avalanche, choose what we will. I was a seer and I know this. I have walked in the future and the past, as I know you can. Do you know me, Destroyer? Did you never see me in your dreams? I am your enemy. I have dedicated my life to defeating you so that Valona's horde might be saved.”

“Waste of a good life,” the crooked man observed.

“
You
would think so. The dreams first came to haunt Valona's seers before my second birth. When the host died and I lived, they became darker and more definite. As a warrior I fought to make Valona's horde strong so that we could resist you when you came. As I became a seer at last, I walked through the dreams of terror you sent against us from the future and I made maps of the things-that-would-be so that our elders could guide the horde away from the death you designed for us. But always the shadows of future danger changed: you changed them to defeat our plans! And when I became an elder, I continued to plan for the day you would arrive.”

“Because I alone truly understood your threat against us, the other elders raised me to be their chief, marh of Valona's horde. Then I set my plans in motion. I purchased human agents in the city to the south. When you corrupted and defeated them, I knew the Destroyer's hour had struck and you were coming to attack us. I sent a troop of warriors to capture you and the agent you had corrupted, but you killed them all. The dreams of our seers grew dark to the point of madness; even now they rave and scream that all is over. But now, at last, it is our fear which is over. We have you! We have you! How does it feel to know that you have failed, Destroyer? How does it feel to know
you
will be destroyed? Will you say nothing? Is it mute, that one drooling mouth given you by the gods-we-hate?”

“I have a thing to say, if you will listen.”

“Say it. I find I have a great hunger to hear you plead and whine and beg.”

“Once there was a man who knew the future,” Morlock said quietly. “He lived by the sea, and an oracle told him he would drown in saltwater. So he fled inland from the seacoast. When he was crossing a bridge over a river in flood, the arch collapsed and the falling stones carried him down to the water and he drowned there, in a flooded salt lick by the side of the river. His fear drove him to the fate he feared. So it is with you, Marh Valone.”

“There is no fate,” Marh Valone cried. “That is the lie you told before, and it is true. We have defeated our fate and your hate.”

“Put aside your fear. I don't hate you, but if you harm me or mine, if you threaten to do so, you will suffer for it. Blood for blood: that is the only law I know.”

Suddenly the Marh was surrounded by the dancing Khroi in black-and-white rags. They reached out their palp-clusters toward him imploringly, and their triple mouths sang a song Thend did not understand.

The Marh's eyes widened in anger or surprise. He gestured with all three of his arms, pointing back up the slope. The dancing Khroi grew silent and still; they bowed down and laid their carapaces on the ground before their leader. But they still stretched out their arms imploringly to him.

“Your presence has poisoned our seers,” he said accusingly to Morlock. “I have gloated over you too long, perhaps. Now, because you are
rokhlan
, a dragonkiller, the guile of dragons wish to have you for their prize, and as their kharum and as marh of Valona's horde, I grant that wish. You and your property will be taken from here to the Giving Field, where the guile may dispose of you for their sport. The werewolf has also killed a dragon, although by mere treachery and stealth, and he too will be given to the dragons, as, of course, our Lost One must be. This blood will seal the bond between guile and horde. These others will go and give their lives for our future in the Vale of the Mother. At the next gathering we will pray their names to the gods-who-hate-us. I have spoken; let others obey.”

Morlock asked, “What do you mean ‘seal the bond’? Aren't these dragons your servants? Don't you ride them like animals?”

The crooked row of dragons erupted in fire and noise. For a while nothing could be heard except their fiery words, meaningless to Thend. He wondered if a fight was going to break out between the dragons and the Khroi then and there, if that was what Morlock was trying to provoke.

Marh Valone fixed Morlock with one eye and stared at him. Then, when the uproar had gone on for a while, he lifted all three of his arms and called out, with all three of his mouths singing at a different tone, a word Thend did not recognize. It sounded as loud as any dragon from where Thend sat, and the row of angry dragons subsided into something like order. Marh Valone spoke a short sentence in the same language, at a slightly lower tone of voices. Thend turned to see the dragons wordlessly lowering their heads in submission. But all of them were glaring at Morlock's shoulders: he had not deigned to turn and look at them while they were shouting and he did not do so now.

“That was quite a good try,” Marh Valone said to Morlock confidentially. “Pride is what binds them to us: they are exiles from the greater guiles to the south and east, ashamed to live as solitaries. If you stayed among us for a time you would no doubt find a way to use that pride and turn them against us. But you will die tonight, a free gift from horde to guile, and their pride and gratitude will bind them to us closer than ever.”

Marh Valone would have turned away then, but another Khroi voice, discordant and clashing, forestalled him. Thend looked and saw standing nearby the Khroi whose carapace was marked, the Khroi he had rescued from the spiders.